Rewilding the world to preserve biodiversity, a controversial idea that is gaining ground

2024-02-16 17:00:11

In North America, an organization is working to connect the main natural areas of the continent to allow the movement of large carnivores. In the tundra of the Russian Far East, a man is reviving the ecosystem of the mammoth steppe in order to prevent the melting of permafrost, these frozen soils of high latitudes which contain enormous quantities of methane and carbon. In England, the debt-ridden owners of a vast agricultural estate decide to change their model by letting farm animals of hardy breeds graze freely alongside the wild fauna which flourishes. Almost everywhere across Europe, the phenomenon of agricultural abandonment is freeing up land which becomes richer and hosts a new spontaneous nature… As different as they are, all these experiences claim the same term: rewilding, or rewilding in English.

Bearing the promise of a revival of biodiversity, rewilding has haunted ecological science for around thirty years, during which it has risen from the margins of the radical American environmentalist movement to the texts on the restoration of the nature of the European Union. Behind the multiplicity of its meanings, the concept hides a potential smokescreen, provoking controversies both among the scientific community on its exact delimitation or its relevance, only on the ground with conflicts of use between naturalists and hunters or farmers.

For some of its supporters, it would simply be the best remedy for the collapse of life: a “nature-based solution”, according to a popular expression. Other researchers, particularly in the social sciences, see it, on the contrary, as yet another false nose of greenwashing masking neocolonial tendencies or a means for developers to buy the rights to continue the plundering of nature. Finally, for part of the rural agricultural world, it is assimilated to a questioning of the lifestyles and practices of breeders (mainly sheep and goats but also cattle) through the figure of the wolf whose forehead Colonization in Europe and France causes serious friction. Until the summit of the European Commission. Didn’t Ursula von der Leyen herself describe the canine as “real danger for livestock and potentially for humans”and proposed, after losing, in September 2022, a pony to the animal’s fangs, to review its status as a protected species?

You have 90% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.